I
WHAT the “self-conceit” of the Apparatus Marxists “accomplished” during the Balkan war was to put their “Marxism” to the task of apologising for and making propaganda on behalf of Serbian imperialism attempting genocide in its colony Kosova.
In April 1999, as soon as NATO started to bomb Yugoslavia, a broad “Stop the War" alliance was formed. It ranged from Tony Benn MP to Bruce Kent of CND, to unreconstructed Stalinists of the Morning Star sort, and, at the organisational core of it, the SWP. The organisers of “Stop the War" rigorously excluded from their movement all demands for Serb withdrawal from Kosova. It was a rigorously pro-Serb campaign. Even supporters of the SWP and this campaign who “only” wanted to add a call for Serb withdrawal from Kosova, were hounded by the block of SWPers, Stalinists and confusionists*.
An understanding of what happened on the British left during the Balkans war, of how Apparatus Marxism operates, is best sought by looking at the problem that faced those whose instinct was properly to oppose “NATO”, who saw great advantage for the left if a strong anti-war movement could be developed, and who, refusing to let the realities of what was happening in the Balkans inhibit them, then worked at the creation of an “anti-war” movement, attempting to lie a “stop the war movement” into existence.
You are assigned by The Party to “make the case against the war", NATO’s war — to write a pamphlet designed to drum up an anti-war movement that will help to “build the revolutionary party". Ideally for this purpose you will want to make the case for some such slogan as “Down with NATO, victory to Milosevic" — something analogous to the slogans in Britain of the great anti-Vietnam war movement: “US troops out — victory to the National Liberation Front". How do you set about it?
You will survey the history, and the political and diplomatic and military realities. In the Marxist tradition you will start with the idea that “war is the continuation of politics by other means"; you will try to ground your “case against the war" in an examination of the politics whose pursuit has now taken the form of war. You will look at the developments that led to this particular war, uncover the hidden objectives, if they are hidden, being pursued by means of war; if there is a discrepancy, you will distinguish the real reasons from the given “good reasons”. You will expose war propaganda, counterpose the truth to official lies, rip off the masks of righteousness and hypocrisy in which the rulers disguise their war aims and expose the less pretty face of reality. You will look objectively at both sides and at all sides.
Is there some hidden political design behind what NATO seems to be doing? For example, is NATO’s concern with Kosova really a design to conquer Serbia? Is it tied into a broader network of conflicts and ambitions in which the Kosovars can only be saved if some other people is sacrificed to the same fate. What if you cannot find a hidden design?
You can of course argue that socialists and consistent democrats should not trust or support NATO, or give it credit in advance for being able to stop Milosevic’s attempted genocide in Kosova, or trust it not to sell out the Albanian Kosovars in a rotten deal with Milosevic. But that is not enough. To do the assigned job, you need to be able to denounce and condemn without qualification what NATO is doing.
With the Marxist procedures outlined above, it would in the 1999 Balkans war have been far easier — although I am not adovating it — to make a case for backing NATO than for opposing it; and for a socialist or consistent democrat it was impossible to make any case in favour of Milosevic.
For truth-driven Marxist politics, making other than a pacifist case against this war presented impossible difficulties.
NATO’s war aim was to stabilise the Balkans by forcing Milosevic to give Serbia’s colony Kosova autonomy — not independence — and stop ethnic cleansing and the killing of Albanians. That was the substantial issue in the war. Milosevic could at any point have stopped NATO’s bombs by ceasing his genocidal drive and withdrawing from Serbia’s colony, Kosova, as he eventually did.
“Stop the war, stop the bombing"? Whether or not ways less costly than bombing for Albanian and Serb alike might have been found, once the full-scale Serbian drive against Kosovar Albanians started, “stop the war, stop the bombing" meant and could not but mean: give Milosevic the victory in Kosova.
To be one-sidedly against NATO is in the existing relationships implicitly to be for Milosevic — to make the case for giving Milosevic a free hand to kill and drive out 90% of the population of Kosova. Even if you did not dare cry “Victory to Milosevic!" that is what such a campaign would stand for. There is the dilemma for those who want to build a “stop the war movement” in April 1999. Only a native or adoptive Serb chauvinist could argue the one-sided “case against NATO’s war" or build a “mass anti-war movement" that could not but be a support campaign, a political foreign legion for Milosevic.
Your best “case against the war" is the perennial pacifist case against all wars. But Marxists are not against all wars. We are for wars of liberation — for wars such as the Kosovar Albanian war of liberation in Serbia’s colony Kosova! So, go back to the Party and report that the assignment is an impossible one and offer the conclusion that the idea of building a pro-Milosevic “anti-war" movement is as daft as, say, campaigning in Britain in the early 1990s for a general strike to bring down the Tory government? You can’t do that? It is not that kind of party.
Then you must use the tried and tested old high-Stalinist techniques yourself. Facts are not sacred; opinion — other than that of the “party leadership" — is not free. Where an old stick-to-the-facts Marxist or consistent democrat would find it impossible to complete a Party Assignment to make the required sort of “case against the war", the difficulty can be overcome. The complexities of the situation can help.
In Kosova the first NATO bombs triggered an enormous escalation of the ethnic cleansing that had been going on for many months — perhaps a quarter of a million Albanian Kosovars had been driven from their homes in 1998 — a killing and driving out of the Albanian Kosovars by the Serbian state and Serb paramilitaries that, within days, had more than half Kosova’s population either uprooted and on the move or dead.
It is not NATO, whatever fault can be justly laid on it that is organising or “provoking” the horrors in Kosova. But confusion is fertile ground for “peace" propaganda. And the bombing of Serbia and Montenegro is repulsive and horrible in itself, whatever the issues. You can write your pamphlet! You can build an anti-war movement.
II
In April 1999, the Socialist Workers' Party published a commentary on the three-way Serb-Kosovar-NATO war, Stop the War, reputedly the work of the academic Alex Callinicos, as a basis of the mass anti-war movement they were trying to build.
In summary its argument is as follows:
1. War is bad; it kills people, makes refugees. NATO's claims that the war would quickly bring peace were false.
2. Milosevic is bad, but not so bad — not Hitler, not a fascist, not even as bad as Croatia's president Tudjman. The US used to regard him as a good man to do deals with.
3. Therefore, any connection of NATO's war to Milosevic's “horrible policies" is “spurious". Actually the driving motive of the war is that “Clinton wants to prove that the US through NATO is the world's policeman".
4. “However horrible the events in Kosovo", what Serbia was doing there was not as bad as the Nazi Holocaust. Moreover, the attitude of the British government and press to Kosovar refugees is hypocritical.
5. The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was due to economic crisis and the fact that “the rulers of each part of Yugoslavia turned to ethnic rabble-rousing in an effort to divert… class feeling into scapegoating".
6. “Milosevic can be toppled" — but by the opposition inside Serbia. And “the NATO bombing… has drowned out" that opposition.
7. The big powers have a bad record in the Balkans.
8. The answer to national conflict there is “to go beyond nationalism" by way of workers' unity.
9. The Labour Party has a bad record on Britain's wars.
10. Anti-war movements are desirable, and socialists “connect the struggles against war with struggles against poverty, bad housing, racism and all oppression".
Stop the War appeals to peace and to the desire for peace in general but in fact means only stop NATO attacks on Serbia and — the implication is unavoidable — give Milosevic a free hand in Kosova. That is all it can mean in context. That is all its authors and publishers intend it to mean.
Organised in eight chapters and an introduction, STW at no point presents an objective, overall, factual account of the Serb-Kosova conflict or of the development of NATO involvement. Facts and elements of the overall picture are doled out only as, when and as much as is necessary to allow STW to argue its case: thereby it does not “argue” its case in terms of reality, measuring itself against the facts and the full picture.
All through, it distorts the realities so as to favour Serbia/Yugoslavia and discredit its Kosovar victims.
This account of the war fades out both Serbia's long oppression of Kosova and its then current attempted genocide of the Kosovars. Shreds of fact in that connection are filtered into the pamphlet, but only negatively: Milosevic is not as bad as Hitler, the West's condemnations of him are hypocritical, his actions in Kosova are not as bad as the Nazi Holocaust, national conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia are the result of evil machinations on all sides — but, yes, it has to be admitted, as a fact now reduced to its proper insignificance, that Milosevic had “horrible policies" in Kosova. In place of the real history of national conflicts in the Balkans, and of Serbian imperialism, centre-place in the story is given to the idea that the US wants to be boss of the world and has seized on Kosova artificially as “another chance to show [the EU] it alone is capable of calling the shots".
The arguments here not only radically misrepresent the reality of Kosova, but pulp basic socialist concepts about imperialism, the national question, democracy, and workers' unity. Not only out of concern for the Kosovars, but also to set a sound basis for socialism in the 21st century, the arguments and methods deserve close critical discussion. There are more weighty renditions of what is discussed here than the pamphlet Stop the War. Stop the War is what it came down to in living politics and in ideas offered to what they hoped would be a large scale movement of youth against the Balkans war.
III
What follows is an analysis and discussion of the SWP pamphlet Stop the War in the form of a fictional dialogue between “Caliban", an SWPer arguing the case made in Stop the War, “Brownstone", an independent working-class socialist, and “Varga", an analyst of political culture and propaganda methods. Our fundamental concern here is with the methods and techniques used in the shame-facedly pro-Milosevic “stop the war” movement.
Caliban: We are anti-imperialists, not moralists. We don’t wring our hands, we build a movement that will eliminate once and for all such suffering as occurred on both sides in Serbia and Kosova! The first step in socialist education is hatred of NATO and opposition to our own rulers.
We made the case against the war as best we could. You stood there, wringing your hands — and objectively making the case for NATO’s war. You accepted their basic lie — that it was for the Kosovars.
Brownstone: No, I accepted the basic fact that, since there was no NATO intention to conquer Serbia, and no people who would suffer the fate in Serbia that Serbia intended for the Kosovar Albanians, or anything remotely like it, the rights of the Kosovar Albanians were the immediate issue in the war, whatever NATO’s motives.
NATO was not trying to conquer Serbia. It was trying to impose “Rambouillet” — NATO’s terms for a Balkan settlement. Those terms fell far short of a consistently democratic policy because they upheld Serbian sovereignty over Kosova and denied self-determination to the Kosovars. But compared to the Serbian drive to wipe out the Kosovars as a nation, they represented survival, civilisation and limited national democracy for the Kosovar Albanians.
NATO acted with scant concern for the Kosovar Albanians. Its targets in Serbia progressively broadened beyond military installations. Political cowardice led Clinton and Blair to put avoiding casualties on their own side above everything else, and that led to many Serb deaths.
But once the bombing and full-scale cleansing started, for Milosevic to win the conflict could not but mean irreversible doom for the Kosovar Albanians as a people and death for large numbers of them. NATO’s victory over Milosevic has made possible the return of the surviving Albanians to Kosova.
It is right to point out what NATO is and what the USA is, and to preach no confidence, endorsement or trust for NATO, the USA, Britain or the European Union. Yet, since you shared all the political assumptions of Rambouillet — for you, the Kosovars’ right to self-determination was a question very much secondary to the big-power politics at stake — you criticised NATO only for its mode of action, for bombing, not for its basic politics. You detached that from any true picture of what Serbia was doing, and attached it — by way of essentially pacifist but one-sided anti-war agitation — to pro-Serbian apologetics.
Serbia was a colonial power in Kosova; an expansionary imperialism, albeit more akin to the imperialism of Tsarist Russia than to the big powers. The prime duty of socialists was solidarity with the colonial revolt of the Kosovar Albanians, and against the Serbian drive for genocide.
Socialists do not necessarily adopt the viewpoint of the Kosovars! But we are obliged not to dismiss them, or side against them with their would-be exterminators. Even if we grant that NATO is imperialist in Kosova, and that Serbia, by some quirk of pedantic definition, is not — from what point of view is imperialism in general, without more specifics, a worse evil than attempted genocide by this murderous “non-imperialism”?
Caliban: You are missing the big picture. I quote: “The war in the Balkans involves two evil forces. One, Slobodan Milosevic, has horrible policies but can only implement them in a fairly limited area. The other, US imperialism, is just as capable of evil but can do so on a world scale. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia are testimony to its crimes, just as the thousands dead in Kosovo are testimony to Milosevic’s crimes."
Brownstone: When Stop the War was written, Pristina had already been emptied of 200,000 people at gun point…
Caliban: Ah, yes! “Every day since [24 March] the horror has worsened… Kosovo's capital, Pristina, has emptied as people flee in fear of Milosevic's paramilitaries and NATO bombs."
Brownstone: No, it was not NATO bombs, but Serbian state terror that forced people out of Pristina. Over half the Kosovar Albanians had already been uprooted and an unknown number killed. Your authors know what happened in the first half of the 1990s in Croatia and Bosnia. And they know that Britain colluded with Milosevic and the UN and bears criminal blame for what happened in Bosnia.
To talk of “thousands dead" in Kosova was grossly to minimise and to falsify the picture at the point in the war when Stop the War was written — not to speak of the prospects for Kosovar Albanians if the “anti-war” movement won its “demands” to leave Slobo alone. It was to try to persuade everybody the pamphlet reached to ignore the attempted genocide. You use the lie direct and couple that with comparing incomparable things — the crimes of the US over time and across the world with the bestial intensity of the immediate, short-term, racist Serb drive to kill and disperse Kosovar Albanians now.
Varga: Double standards are indispensable to Caliban. Without them, he thinks he will be conceding a little bit of the moral high ground to NATO or US imperialism.
Brownstone: You display great indignation against the “hundreds of thousands” of dead attributed to the USA, and so little indignation against the slaughter organised by Milosevic as to cover for its perpetration. Therefore in an auxiliary way, you collude in it. You help set up a propaganda smoke screen for Milosevic — specifically aimed at the working class and the left and, in the first place, the members and supporters of the SWP.
You exonerate Milosevic in Kosova by finding him not guilty of being Hitler, and not guilty of being the world’s leading capitalist power. You deploy proper anti-capitalist humane outrage — in the propaganda service of people attempting genocide! You compare incomparables, dissolving the concrete now into world history and generalities. The horror wreaked by capitalism in the world is invoked to minimise and excuse the very specific horror of would-be genocide in Kosova.
Many evils are conflated with the intention of making distinctions impossible and so as to maximise the evil and guilt attributable to one and minimise that of the other. Invocation of the general evil is used to diffuse the impact of the concrete evil in Kosova. This is the intellectually and morally corrosive classic Stalinist method. For example, the old conflation of economic grinding down of people by capitalism with direct slaughter. It belongs intellectually to the same order of things as the argument that, all things on both sides taken account of, the USSR with its low rents, etc was more democratic than any capitalist country. The late Nahuel Moreno, one of the leading kitsch-Trotskyists, once wrote a book to prove it.
Why did NATO go to war? It had the general aims of policing and stabilising the region for maximum penetration by “the imperialism of free trade”. Beyond that, European or American imperialist aims played no part in this war.
Caliban: That's what Ken Livingstone said in order to justify the NATO bombing! “‘Western or Yankee imperialist’ aims are not involved in the war, Labour MP Ken Livingstone claimed as he backed the bombing".
Varga: You deal with Livingstone's point, not by direct argument, but by using “guilt by association" with his pro-NATO conclusion. It is an old Stalinist technique. They would deflect true criticisms of the USSR by associating them with people who used them in the service of the Nazis, or Cold War arms build-ups or US imperialism.
Caliban: “Clinton wants to prove that the US through NATO is the world's policeman." That is what's central to the war. “The US has certainly been the driving force in pushing for war, just as in numerous other military adventures over the last two decades, from the invasion of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s to the recent bombing of Sudan and Iraq." The same people decided to bomb Yugoslavia. “The US does not have two rival sets of armed forces and intelligence agencies… the Clinton administration behind the bombing is the same Clinton administration that dances to the tune of agribusiness giant Monsanto or the Chiquita fruit company as it attempts to dictate trade policy to the Third World… [Its] policies on debts mean” — we quote Barton Briggs of Morgan Stanley, the bankers — “200 million sullen Latin Americans sweating away in the hot sun for the next decade so that Citicorp can raise its dividend twice a year”.
Brownstone: Yes. That is capitalism! Having defined the US as imperialist around the issue of “Iraqi oil” (it was Kuwaiti oil, in fact), you admit no such issue exists in Kosova. (“There is no oil there like in Iraq"). You link Kosova to the aggressive economic policies of US corporations and banks in the Third World.
In most of the Third World today, imperialist domination is via “free trade”. The policies imposed from gigantic economic strength on the poor countries of the world are indeed an obscenity. We can agree to denounce this “imperialism of free trade and usury”. But how can that denunciation justify siding with Serb colonialism and would-be genocide in Kosova?
Varga: Caliban’s problem is to show that what is happening in the Balkans now is imperialism being imperialism, and that it is so much worse than Serb colonial-imperialism in Kosova that socialists should back Serbia. How can this be done? Throw in a lot of background patter about IMF plans and Gulf oil — enough to create an impression that there is solid Marxist economic theory in the background, and that NATO’s war in Kosova is loosely analogous to those IMF plans and the Gulf war — and then concentrate on the bombings! Bombing is imperialism!
Brownstone: What is the specific US motivation for war against Yugoslavia? Yugoslavia’s world-famous bananas? “There is no oil like in Iraq.” Well then, what?
Caliban: Since the collapse of the USSR the USA “has been out to show that it is the only superpower. Its strategic aim is to exercise ‘hegemony’ throughout the world — to get its way in any disagreement with other states, big or small”.
Brownstone: So this imperialism has no other aim but the exercise of power to show who is boss? Specific economic aims? No. Does Kosova, or Yugoslavia, have special strategic or symbolic importance? No. Is the US concerned, as it was in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, to thwart some rival imperialist cartel (the Moscow-led Stalinist bloc in Indochina)? No, on your account imperialism is imperialism is imperialism is imperialism is… Imperialism is power, throwing its weight around.
That may be part of the truth of every imperialism in history, but what distinguishes different sorts of imperialism is drive, motive, objectives, modus operandi. This line, “imperialism is power”, like its companion elsewhere in the pamphlet, “war is killing”, is too abstract to be an adequate account of reality — or to guide politics with a grip on reality. If power is imperialism, and imperialism is power, that allows you to side against the biggest power, irrespective of the issues. The vast technical-military difference between NATO and Serbia renders Serbian imperialism and everything specific to it unimportant and insignificant. Anti-imperialism narrows to opposing the militarily most powerful imperialism. You side with a primitive, weak (in world terms) and backward colonial imperialism which is attempting genocide, against NATO which, in order to stabilise the European Union’s borders, is thwarting it! It is like an idiot, convinced that all thieves and robbers are six foot three inches tall, who hysterically raises the alarm against one of them who is, for his own reasons, really trying to stop a gang of murderous robbers all of whom happen to be four foot eleven inches tall.
Such basics of Marxist analysis as war aims, the preceding history and the entire political context are all faded out. On one side you have a police action executed brutally and clumsily, and on the other attempted genocide — but socialists side with the genocidal murderers!
Caliban: You’re just going along with NATO’s demonisation of Milosevic. But we’ve seen it all before. “The end of the Cold War in 1989 was… followed by promises of a new world of progress and peace. Yet, within a year, Saddam Hussein was proclaimed the ‘new Hitler’”. Atrocity stories were invented. “The multi-million arms business guzzles resources” while babies and old people go without.
Varga: Just proclaimed? Your indignant point-scoring against NATO suppresses the real socialist critique of the NATO powers — that they do not pursue a democratic foreign policy — that they deliberately worked to preserve the Iraqi regime (without Saddam Hussein, they hoped).
Caliban: “Lies are poured out to defend the killing. Then a few years later it is often hard to find anyone to defend the slaughter”.’
Varga: Everything concrete, specific and real is faded into vast generalities — to hide the specific, real, concrete facts about Serbia and Kosova.
Caliban: Milosevic is no Hitler: and someone far more a Hitler than Milosevic is on NATO’s side! President Tudjman of Croatia, leader of “the most right-wing government in Europe since the rule of the fascist General Franco in Spain”, who four years ago drove out 200,000 Krajina Serbs from Croatia!
Brownstone: But Milosevic in Kosova was driving out and killing ten times as many.
Caliban: More, NATO’s war whipped up nationalist feeling in Serbia and created a risk of the real Serb fascists gaining ground. If Serbia was defeated, reaction in Serbia would gain. “There are real fascists in Yugoslavia today, but they are not in power. One of the terrible outcomes of the bombing is that these people have been strengthened, not weakened."
Brownstone: Therefore we should not want Serbia defeated?
Varga: Here you must be sure to evade the pertinent question: what would “real” Serb fascists do in Kosova that Milosevic was not doing?
Monsters can be made to seem less monstrous by being identified with something known, familiar and not very threatening. The Stalinists used that technique a great deal to pass off features of their police-state regimes which they could not easily deny or explain away. In the same way, Stop the War scales down Milosevic’s crimes, while appearing to be righteously critical of him, by equating him with the retired British Tory politician Norman Tebbit. “His policies are hard right wing, but he is not a fascist. In fact he is the Serbian version of the Tory Norman Tebbit rather than the Serbian Hitler." Nietzsche got only part of it right: if you fight with dragons you become a dragon. And if you cuddle up to dragons you cease to be able to see that they are dragons.
Caliban: Your view of Milosevic could not but play into the hands of NATO. It had to be fought if the case against the war was to be made. NATO was “demonising” Milosevic for no other good reason than to whip up a war drive.
Varga: Milosevic is not quite “one of us”, but he too is the victim of NATO propaganda. That is the message of Stop the War. The laws of war propaganda apply to building an anti-war movement, which can be a factor in war! You pick your side and then say what you need to say.
Caliban: The US chief negotiator at the end of the Bosnian war (1995), Richard Holbrooke, described him as “a man we can do business with, a man who recognises the realities of life in former Yugoslavia”. “Now he [Milosevic] is demonised in order to provide a spurious justification for a show of US power.”
Brownstone: Of course, what could be more spurious than attempted genocide?
IV
Varga: Stop the War is careful not to explain that NATO supported Milosevic as the strong man in the region and wanted him to control Kosova. NATO turned on him primarily because they feared that Milosevic’s “cleansing” Kosova of 90% of its people would set off what they hoped Milosevic’s heavy hand would stop — the destabilisation of the Balkans. By starting on 24 March, at the point of the breakdown of relations between Milosevic and NATO, Stop the War can blame the war on the US gratuitously seeking to provoke conflict just so that it can show off its power.
Brownstone: You go mechanically and cheerfully wherever you are taken by the negative thrust of your reaction against “imperialism” — in fact, against advanced capitalism, because what makes the US imperialist in Kosova, but Serbia not (in your eyes), is only that the US is more powerful and more advanced.
Try reading back your approach here to China in the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. Compared to the USA’s advanced, primarily economic, imperialism, Japan’s was very backward — an archaic militarism engaged in primitive plunder.
Six months before Japan’s “surprise” attack on the US base in Honolulu [December 1941], the USA had imposed economic sanctions on Japan that would have stifled it in a short time. The attack on “Pearl Harbour” was not cause but result. Apply the principle that you side against the most developed, strongest, more viable imperialism and with its backward, economically primitive, less viable opponent, ignore “complications” like Serbia’s attempted genocide in Kosova or Japan’s murderous work in China, and what do you get? You would side with Japan, and denounce the US alone as the provoker of war. You would accuse China, the US’s ally after December 1941, of “playing into the hands of the USA” and of helping “imperialism” — economically the strongest capitalist power, and responsible for immense suffering in peace as well as in war. You would “defend” Japan and concentrate all your denunciations of imperialism against US imperialism. Your agitation would centre on such things as US fire bombing Japanese cities, while the Japanese could not touch mainland America. You would make war propaganda against US imperialism and use all the tricks you use in Stop the War to counter US accounts of what Japan was doing in China.
In World War Two there were serious Marxists, Max Shachtman and his comrades, who felt that China’s liberation struggle had become so tied up with the cause of the imperialism with which China allied, the USA’s, that the Chinese nationalists and Stalinists could no longer be supported against Japan. I think they were mistaken. But they would have hanged themselves before they’d have made pro-Japanese propaganda against China as part of their opposition to US imperialism!
For you, Karl Liebknecht’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan “The main enemy is at home” becomes “The only enemy is at home”.
Varga: It’s a better story-line to “build the revolutionary party”. But it’s not all it seems. We’ll find later that Stop the War sees the real “Great Satan” not “at home”, but in the US, as compared to relatively harmless European capitalism.
Brownstone: The good old basic slogan of German social-democracy, “Not a penny, not a man, for this system!”, designed to secure independent working class politics in an era of capitalist growth and development, and, thus, to prepare the overthrow of capitalism, becomes: say no whenever the ruling class says yes.
Caliban: Because the world is long ripe for socialism, advanced capitalism is reactionary!
Varga: Paradoxically, this idea — capitalism is ripe for socialism, therefore further capitalist development is reactionary — demands of anti-imperialists that they ally again and again with reactionary forces — Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic — in their clashes with advanced capitalism.
From the point of view of the SWP now, it is an historical accident, a leftover from the days when you had a less party-solipsistic view of politics, that you did not side with Stalinism in the Cold War. The logic that makes you support Milosevic, Saddam, or Khomeini would dictate exactly that conclusion. On a world scale you have become Karl Marx’s “reactionary socialists”!
Brownstone: And the political cost of your habit of substituting of outside agency, real or imagined, for the real dynamics of class and nation within the situation, is that it bankrupts you again and again, on issue after issue — on Ireland and Israel/Palestine for example, as well as Kosova. It means that in area after area, real history is blocked off, and, in the name of “anti-imperialism” and “revolution”, the peoples involved are treated with a condescending metropolitan contempt. Their life and death concerns are only “false consciousness”, artefacts of bad men and the demon imperialism (and of the absence of socialists).
Caliban: Our job is not to make a general objective analysis, giving due weight to all relevant factors, as if we are just wise onlookers. The point is to change the world. And to mobilise the forces for that, we must focus the blame on imperialism and capitalism.
Brownstone: Indeed, we must agitate. But if Marxists do no more than agitate, if we do not understand real history in our own independent working-class way, then we can only mirror capitalism’s picture of itself, putting bad or negative where official capitalism puts good, or positive. We can not even challenge, still less defeat, the bourgeoisie in the battle of ideas.
E P Thompson famously wanted to save the working people of 200 years ago from the shallow elitist historians — “from the enormous condescension of posterity”. Here, it is necessary to rescue the peoples of oppressed and warring nations of today from the manipulative condescension of pretentious, deeply ignorant, kitsch leftists.
For example, the Dayton Accord of 1995 divided Bosnia into two separate zones, 51% to Croats and Muslims, 49% to Serbs. Stop the War records this fact, and describes it as “imposed by the US”. Responsibility, full and complete, is here attributed to outsiders in an utterly false construction. Yes, the US and NATO “imposed” it. But internal forces created what NATO froze. Any true account of what the UN and, especially, Britain contributed to shaping this would indict them for colluding with Milosevic! If the authors of Stop the War were consistent, they would have to say that the old NATO policy of backing Milosevic as the strong man to keep national conflicts under a heavy lid was right, and that NATO’s crime now is to have abandoned that policy, “under US pressure”.
The SWP’s US-focussed anti-imperialism has the curious consequence of pulling punches in their criticism of Britain’s terrible role in Kosova and Bosnia in the late 1980s and early 1990s!
Caliban: Moreover, “why has the US bypassed the United Nations?” Doesn’t that prove the US is up to no good?
Varga: There is a lot of support for the UN! Don't be afraid to mobilise it!
Brownstone: But do you support the UN?
Caliban: No. “The US and Britain are deliberately ignoring rules they themselves drew up… The UN has never stopped the world being a dangerous place. The new NATO policy will make it even more dangerous.” We focus on the USA as the obvious main enemy. Remember the Vietnam anti-war movement? The Dayton peace deal meant driving Serbs, Croats and Muslims from one area to another!
Brownstone: “Meant driving”? Who drove? Primarily, Milosevic’s forces, by way of “ethnic cleansing”. Should “the West” have tried to stop it? How? Bombs? And what would the authors of Stop the War have said?
Varga: Note Caliban’s strong nerve here. To denounce the driving out of 200,000 Krajina Serbs as the mark of “the most right-wing government in Europe since Franco”, and simultaneously to denounce intervention to stop the killing and driving out of two million Kosovar Albanians! That takes a steely determination not to let consistency get in the way of a good “case against the war”. After this, Stop the War gives us a very belatedly doled-out but central part-fact — a “truth-lie”. Dayton “gave Milosevic control over Kosova as ‘compensation’ for accepting the forced removal of Serbs from Krajina in Croatia”. There was then no question of anything else. Milosevic already had control over Kosova. Not to “give” it to Milosevic would mean taking it from him. How? Bombs? This war? But then… not now?
Caliban: The point is to show that NATO is responsible for the terrible things Milosevic was doing!
Brownstone: And so when they acted to stop it, you denounced them and backed Milosevic?
Caliban: But the war was about the fact that “Clinton wants to prove that the US is the world’s policeman”. “The US has been out to show that it is the only superpower… But other big states are not always willing to go along with its schemes. There have, for instance, been repeated disputes over trade with the West European countries, such as the current ‘banana wars', and Japan."
Brownstone: Yes, but how does this fit into what the US and West Europe were doing together in the Balkans?
Caliban: The US “has attempted to pull these [western European] states into line by showing it alone has the military power to act as world policeman, imposing the common requirements of the big states on any smaller ‘rogue' state that steps out of line… Now the Kosovan crisis has given it another chance to show it alone is capable of calling the shots in the European Union’s own backyard. It reckons that European governments which rely on its military hardware against Yugoslavia will be much less likely to complain at its policies over trade, debt, Monsanto, Middle East oil, or anything else."
Brownstone: You do not explain what it is that the European governments want to do “against Yugoslavia”, or why they have to rely on the US’s “military hardware” for it rather than using their own. Still, this is the nearest you get to a suggestion of a clear NATO war goal. The USA’s real target is not Serbia, but the European Union! The war is “really” about the USA whipping the European Union into line! Kosova is just a “chance” for the US to do that.
Not only is this story a fantasy — it is the old-CP style demonisation of the US to let the local — British, French, whatever — bourgeoisie off the hook.
Varga: Establishing that NATO was acting imperialistically in any more than a general “imperialism of free trade” sense was always a major difficulty. Motives for NATO had to be found other than the upfront business of Kosova. Here the old CP distinction between one's own country and demonic US capitalism was the tack to take.
Caliban: In 1991, with Iraq, the US made sure the Middle East's oil supplies remained in Western hands. In Croatia and Bosnia, the US had another success. Germany “had ignited the Yugoslav powder keg" by recognising Croatia “under a leader who admired the wartime fascist regime of the Ustashe".
Brownstone: That is a plain lie. But in any case, what about the fact that 90% of the people of Croatia had freely voted for independence?
Caliban: “Only the US was able to bring order to the breakaway states — training the Croat army, arming the Bosnian Muslims, bombing the Serbs and finally helping the Croats ‘ethnically cleanse’ most of the Croatian Serbs.” The US has further cemented its influence over Europe by including Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in NATO. The Kosova crisis, to repeat, is “another chance to show it alone is capable of calling the shots in the European Union's own backyard”.
Brownstone: What evidence do you have for all this?
Caliban: Proof! ‘The pro-war Guardian gave the game away…
Brownstone: So this is all a matter of secret plans, revealed by the Guardian through accidental indiscretion? But if the main issue at stake is the US’s desire to impose its will on the European Union, why ever would the European Union capitalist classes — and their newspapers, like the Guardian — want to do anything but protest loudly?
Caliban: The Guardian gave the game away when it said: “NATO needs to be tested in its new guise and this conflict will do the job as well as any other.” The US sees NATO as the key vehicle to impose its will across the world.
Varga: This is the classic Stalinist technique of using bitty quotes from “the other side", without context, using them to prove dark and improbable conspiracies, and “proving” the whole construction by an appeal to readers’ general sense that the US must be up to no good! The classic of this sort is called The Great Conspiracy Against Russia. It was published in the USA in 1946. Of the two authors, Sawyers and Kahn, one was later revealed as a USSR secret police agent. Published with an introduction by US senator Claude Pepper, it told the story of Russia's recent history as established in the Moscow Trials of the old Bolshevik leaders in 1936, '37 and '38. Bukharin was a blond Machiavelli in a leather jacket, Trotsky with his “pudgy manicured hands", rehearsed his gestures before a mirror. The work was full of snippets of quotes, even from Trotsky — all to lend verisimilitude to enormous lies.
Caliban’s politically one-sided and mendaciously selective intellectual shambles is like the staple fare of the western CPs in the high Stalinist Cold War period!
V
Brownstone: The most remarkable political product of what you say is the anti-Americanism: in the good old days, the European CPs would be pseudo-patriotic and anti-American to exploit “the contradictions of imperialism”. Before the development in the 1960s of the US anti-Vietnam war movement, the cry in Europe, including Britain, was “Yankee bastards go home".
Varga: And we used to think that “the main enemy" is at home?
Brownstone: You are repeating the fundamental intellectual technique used by Stalinism. You separate the negative Marxist criticism of advanced capitalist society from the positive socialist programme and link it to an alien positive programme, reactionary and historically regressive — support for Serbia in Kosova.
Caliban: But national conflicts can only create suffering. “Every ruler in the region has played the nationalist card, and each time the people who have paid for it have been the ordinary Serbs, Croats, Albanians or Bosnian Muslims." “The Albanian people are spread across six states — Albania itself, Kosova, Montenegro, southern Serbia, Greece and Macedonia. They make up somewhere over a third of the two million people who live in Macedonia. They have demanded separation from Macedonia and to be part of Albania. The break-up of Macedonia would draw in neighbouring states. Bulgaria claims much of Macedonia. Any wider war would draw in the region's two biggest powers — Turkey and Greece."
Brownstone: So best tell the oppressed nations to shut up, endure the status quo, and wait for workers' unity? Here Stop the War shares basic political attitudes with NATO: valuing the status quo, the existing state borders, above the rights of oppressed nations like the Kosovars, who threaten to destabilise their own borders and others. It is an echo of what was said at the outset of bombing by one side of the NATO and British establishment — the more statesman-like, patrician, cold-blooded side. Denis Healy, for example. It is a very curious role for socialists to play!
Varga: But Stop the War could scarcely avoid playing it.
Brownstone: Elitism here is all-contaminating. Stop the War rejects the reports of murder and ethnic cleansing in Kosova. It minimises the then known facts of Serbian ethnic cleansing. It maximises the civilian casualties of NATO bombs. Those were a few dozen or at most a couple of hundred when Stop the War was written. The final total was 1,400 according to the Yugoslav government. Stop the War flames with rage about those hundreds of casualties, while about the attempted genocide of the Kosovars it is cool, sceptical, and philosophical.
Varga: Another very important point is slipped in obliquely and with admirable skill at the end of Chapter five of Stop the War. Philosophically, with the manner of objective historians, the authors throw this in: “Over the centuries the balance between Kosova's two populations has constantly shifted.”
Brownstone: So you won’t get too upset now, will you? Just another typically Balkan shuffling of the ethnic cards. This is ancient Illyria, sir, that is how things are done there.
Varga: It is important if an anti-war movement is to be built to develop a sense of fatalism, to present the ethnic cleansing of Kosova as already an irreversible fact of history and NATO bombing as only sterile revenge. “Albanians used to make up about 90% of the population of Kosova, and Serbs 10%.” The mass cleansing of Kosova is a fait accompli.
Brownstone: The rampaging, butchering “cleansers” do their work, and having done it move on… The ethnic cleanser’s work is relentless as Fate and irreversible.
Then the basic political grievance against NATO turns out to be that they won’t accept it! Instead of letting the Balkan conflicts take their regrettable-but-to-be-expected course, the devilish USA seized on one of them as a “chance” to strike a blow against the European Union!
Varga: For Caliban, the life of one of the members of the chosen Serb “übermensch” nation is worth very large numbers of the inferior, Albanian “untermensch” people. This is a shameless use of the double-standard or the lie-by-omission, a favourite war-propaganda technique of the Stalinists in war, Cold War and peace. The Kosovar Albanians come a poor second to the Serbs.
And why? Because everything comes second to “building the party” via “building the anti-war movement”. At the National Union of Teachers conference, 2-5 April 1999, this priority was translated into the argument that the Albanian Kosovar entity was no more. Therefore, to concern ourselves with Kosova was futile. Our only concern should be that bloody NATO be given a bloody nose. Workers’ Liberty supporter Patrick Murphy reported: “One of our comrades asked the SWP’s most senior NUT person why they had insisted on dropping self-determination for Kosova from the motion. Up until this week, he assured her, it was their position to support Kosovar rights. However, that was now an abstraction: the Kosovars had been driven out; there was no Kosova to speak of and probably never would be” [WL55].
Caliban: We care about the Kosovars! In our pamphlet, we challenge the imperialists’ good faith. “Who really cares for the refugees?… The government and the media use the suffering of Kosovar refugees as the excuse for their bombing." But Britain won't let refugees in! “As NATO bombs were launched on the Balkans" the Home Secretary tried to deport a Kosovar refugee. But “happily" the Appeal Court threw out the deportation order.
Brownstone: So, just as there is said to be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner saved than over hordes of the steadily righteous, the authors of Stop the War show more concern for the plight of one Kosovar Albanian in Britain than two million in Kosova!
Caliban: The enemy is at home! What he does here is more important than what is done overseas. And what hypocrites the Daily Mail and the Daily Star are! Until recently they were boors, baiting Kosovar Albanian refugees — now they worry about the fate of Kosova's Albanian children! The Mail wants to let them in! “Disgustingly hypocritical!"
Brownstone: My enemy's enemy is never as bad as my enemy is; petty crimes of my enemy dwarf enormous crimes of my enemy's enemy.
Caliban: The enemy we can get at is the one at home!
Brownstone: Internationalism in the hands of political idiots becomes deranged parochialism!
Varga: Note the skilful demagogue's trick of inflating the less important details to evade the big things — here, the fate of a comparatively small number of refugees in Britain gives them more scandal and generates more indignation than what is happening to two million in Kosova.
Brownstone: The good old slogan of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, “The main enemy is at home", is used to justify shameless apologetics for terrible things far away and to camouflage the inverted chauvinism of siding with Milosevic and wanting him to win even when it means death for an unknown number of Albanian Kosovars.
Caliban: The refugees in Britain are something we can rouse people on — without helping NATO imperialism! The people who let themselves be lined up behind NATO out of sympathy with Albanians should confine themselves to the Albanians here at home!
Varga: Softies and “humanitarians" are a problem in making “the case against the war". All you can do is try to give them a proper sense of perspective on Kosova. Stop the War has a boxed-off section specifically written for softies. “Nobody could fail to be moved by the suffering of the refugees fleeing Kosova."
Brownstone: Nobody but the authors of Stop the War! In fact, this, halfway into the pamphlet, is the first definite reference in the pamphlet to the fact that Serbia is doing anything out of order in Kosova, or that the war involves anything but the US gratuitously using “a chance” to show Europe who’s boss. Even here the pamphlet gives no indication of who (the Serbian state) has been driving Kosovars to become refugees. This fact will be left to the last page of the pamphlet, when the reader will be suitably prepared to accept that it is of secondary significance.
Caliban: “Their fate is tragically similar to many others in a world where economic crisis and war are commonplace."
Brownstone: Socialists must be resigned and fatalistic about such things and denounce the bourgeoisie which for its own reasons is less resigned, as the only enemy! Wait until socialism changes everything!
Caliban: “In the same week that every newspaper produced graphic pictures of the Kosovans' torment, around 200,000 refugees were driven from their homes in Angola."
Brownstone: NATO is not concerned about Africans, therefore, we, the readers of Stop the War, should not care about Kosova Albanians!
Varga: The technique here is to use general cosmopolitan guilt to defocus and numb concern about Kosova. Two million? Pah! What is that in the great sea of suffering under capitalism? If the Kosovar Albanians had any decency or feelings of solidarity with the people of the Third World they would spurn NATO's help! If they were anti-imperialist they would want Serbia to win.
Caliban: Of course you can't expect such people to have an overview: but we are not limited to the outlook of the unfortunate Albanians.
Brownstone: No — you are free to adopt the outlook of Serb colonial-imperialists in the name of abstract anti-imperialism!
Varga: Tact is everything here. Do not give even approximate figures for Kosova. The population of Pristina (200,000) is of course well known. But that was NATO bombs, remember? Unavoidably, a picture of Kosova is slowly being built up. But that can be controlled. The reader can, so to speak, be walked backwards through Hell, becoming gradually more aware of where she is in the flickering light. Stop the War doles out bits of truth about the broader picture as she is backed past it.
The beauty of the walking backwards technique is that every additional detail can be made to seem its opposite. You are given a late-in-the-pamphlet firm statement about Kosovar Albanian suffering — only to be told, having been softened up, that it is commonplace in this hell-ridden capitalist world. You are not to worry too much about it or you will fall for “NATO" propaganda and double standards.
The proper socialist attitude here is to be blasé and fatalistic. Revolutionary socialists must not let themselves get angry. A numb holier-than-them smugness about capitalism and its “commonplace" crises, crimes and wars is better!
Caliban: That way you won't play into anyone's hands. Stop the War has the courage to fight the one-sidedness, distortion, narrow-minded manipulation, and dishonesty of the British press and politicians…
Varga: …with their own weapons. For why should we leave the best tunes for the devil to play? The Stalinists understood that! The psychology here is that socialists must compete with the bourgeoisie not by pitting truth against lies and half-lies, but by constructing a better “story” using lies and half-truths where that will help the good work.
VI
Caliban: We do not support Milosevic. We support the opposition in Serbia. What scares Milosevic and all the other rulers is the sort of united movement that was seen in the 1980s, where workers of all nationalities begin to direct their anger at their rulers and not each other.
Brownstone: There were no chauvinists among the strikers? If national and communal conflicts would oblige us by vanishing, we could have a good trade union struggle? Yet we have, even now, some good trade union struggles. Without an agreed political solution, they have never solved anything.
Caliban: They are a start!
Brownstone: Marxists do not just hope for that “start” to develop into political action capable of changing society. We put forward a programme. What is yours for the national conflicts in the Balkans? You side with the oppressors against the oppressed!
Caliban: We side against the great worldwide oppressor!
Brownstone: Blind negativism! As part of it you side with the local oppressor! You pretend to think that you are living up to the socialist principle that you side with the oppressed against the oppressor. In fact, what guides you is not who you side with, but who you side against. But there is no such thing as a revolutionary politics that is purely negative. Serbia was not fighting for liberation from colonial enslavement, or for anything but the right to be a colonial oppressor of the worst kind. Yet you said: Let Milosevic have his way in Kosova — for fear of worse. You apologised for swinishness, and made arguments for submitting to it on the grounds that to act against it would “provoke” (or, in old CP parlance, “play into the hands of”) something worse. Settle for this horror because — you say! — it is the lesser horror! After all, what was Kosova? For you, Kosova was only a word — not two million people faced with death or displacement. An inconvenient word.
Caliban: In 1991 and 1996 Milosevic’s position was threatened by the opposition. In March 1991 tens of thousands of students and workers protested on the streets of Belgrade — against government repression and censorship. At its height, a quarter of a million occupied Belgrade city centre and brought the city to a halt for five days. They chanted “Slobo must go”.
Brownstone: A central part of the real picture is suppressed. Some reports say that the anti-Milosevic demonstrations also called for action against the Kosovar Albanians! Laura Silber’s reports for instance. The Serb opposition is awash with rancid chauvinism — a fact Stop the War will slip in later on, as a mere reservation.
But in any case the Serb opposition could not, even if it wanted to, act in time to make a difference to the Kosovars!
Caliban: Your problem is that you have no faith in the Serbian working class!
Brownstone: Your problem is that you are a self-deceiving hypocrite! And an irresponsible one. Marxists advocate unity between the workers of the oppressed and oppressing nations on the basis of a programme of consistent democracy — that is, of securing the interests of the oppressed. Not Stop the War. You do not mention the Kosovar workers’ action in 1991 — stay-down-the-mine strikes in defence of Kosovar autonomy within a federal Yugoslavia. Or the moving and inspiring solidarity of the employed Kosovars with the unemployed, victimised by Milosevic — donating a proportion of their incomes to support others. Even your focus on working-class action is selective.
Varga: This selectivity, too, requires strong nerves and rigid self-control against sentimentality and squeamishness and inconvenient universalising tendencies. The working class of an oppressed nation “allied to imperialism” is not the same as the working class of an oppressor nation! For Caliban, the Kosovars have become part of a “bad people”, a people made bad because of their place in the “international balance of forces”. They are so lacking in anti-imperialist feeling that they accept imperialist help to fight off the assault of a vastly stronger power, their colonial masters, intent on genocide!
Caliban: Tanks and troops crushed the opposition. Milosevic feared being toppled by revolution, like Ceaucescu in 1989. Six hundred demonstrators had to be released from jail.
Brownstone: Why do you paint a picture of recent past opposition in the Serbian state that ignores the Kosovar Albanian question and the opposition’s attitude to it?
Caliban: Because we have our priorities right! True, the main nationalist leader was Vuk Draskovic, who, “disastrously”, was a worse nationalist than Milosevic himself. But Milosevic also faced workers’ opposition: “Labour unrest is the greatest threat to the Serbian government,” wrote Laura Silber in the Financial Times.
Brownstone: That might be true. And the politics of the labour unrest? Unless the “restless” workers accepted a class, an internationalist, a consistently democratic programme, what immediate difference would their action, or their victory, make to the Kosovar Albanians? This is a crazily Serb-centred approach: the Albanians must wait, or, as things were when Stop the War was written, flee or die.
Caliban: “Even as late as spring 1991, as Yugoslavia’s bloody war got under way, some 700,000 workers went on strike in Serbia to demand higher wages.”
Brownstone: And in Kosova workers went on strike for political reasons against the abolition of Kosovar autonomy!
Caliban: “But, tragically, there was no socialist leadership which could argue to unite workers’ anger over living conditions and wages with opposition to nationalism.”
Brownstone: Opposition to nationalism? To nationalism, yes. But not, if the “socialist leaders” are Marxists, to national rights! Consistent democracy, including the right of self-determination for nations, is always a part of our basic programme. The striking Serb workers could not be taken forward politically to working-class politics unless they would accept such an approach to Yugoslav national conflicts. The workers of the different nations — for example, of Serbia and Kosova, both of whom had strikes at this time — could not be united against nationalism except on the basis of a democratic, working-class programme on the national question, one that proposed a viable framework for mutual accommodation and co-existence.
Your whole approach depends on the idea that there were no real national grievances, only spurious conflicts generated by bad politicians and imperialist impositions. But there were real and pressing issues of national rights — and not only for the Albanians! Your approach is boneheaded sectarian socialism — in the service of Serb chauvinism!
Caliban: “In 1993, at the height of nationalist frenzy, there were strikes in Serbia and Croatia”, and anti-war demos in Belgrade. “Milosevic was nearly toppled again in 1996. Mass protests in Serbia took place every day for 100 days from November.”
Brownstone: In terms of the war and the Kosovar Albanians, what is the point of all this? The Kosovar Albanians must wait for the Serbs? They must wait — under the ground or across the borders — for the Serbian opposition to win and then for the victors to outgrow their nationalism and chauvinism? For now, they must die or let themselves be driven out? This is to let anti-NATOism drive you to the point of the most extreme Serb chauvinism and reaction! The Albanians must gladly die rather than fight and risk destabilising the Balkans. They must die rather than form an alliance with NATO against Serbia to avoid Kosovar Albanian extirpation; die rather than bring NATO’s bombs raining down on Serbia. They must die for… Serbia. The addle-headed anti-nationalists turn into vicarious Serbian chauvinists!
You claim that “the rulers of each part of Yugoslavia turned to ethnic rabble-rousing in an effort to divert… class feeling into scapegoating". But such lordly even-handedness is, like all even-handed blanket condemnations of nationalism, back-handed support for the dominant nation, in this case, Serbia. And how do you explain that every “part of Yugoslavia” did allow itself to be turned into “ethnic rabble”? Did Stalinism have anything to do with it?
Caliban: In the 1950s and 60s Yugoslavia “was regarded as a stable and essentially peaceful part of Europe”. After those decades of harmony, what happened in the late 1980s and the 1990s was “the result of economic crisis and of manoeuvres by outside powers and local rulers".
Brownstone: In the fight against imperialism, we must not let the question of Stalinism distract us. Stop the War's “history" of modern Yugoslavia has the distinction of mentioning Stalinism only obliquely, and of implicitly praising it.
Varga: Here there is a profound difficulty. The national question is a real, autonomous force. In old-style pre-Stalinist Marxism, Marxists were always concerned to put forward a programme of consistent democracy on this question — the right of self-determination without regard or respect for existing state boundaries. But any of that here will derail the necessary simplicities. Remember the line: the US has just seized on Kosova, a terrible tragedy but one “tragically similar to many others in a world where economic crisis and war are commonplace”, indeed a routine one by Balkan standards, to show off its might. We need a story about the Balkans that dispenses with the national question!
Caliban: Economic crisis led “Yugoslav leaders" to encourage outside economic investment. Worse crisis. The IMF dictated cuts. “Yugoslavia was being torn apart by deep crises imposed by the market, and intensified by the bankers." But Yugoslavia was not yet torn apart. Workers responded by attacking “their own bosses". 365,000 workers took part in 1,570 strikes in 1987; there were enormous demonstrations in Belgrade the next year. Four thousand Serb and Croat factory workers marched seven miles in protest at an International Monetary Fund austerity diktat. They largely ignored a small group of Serb nationalists calling for the blood of Albanians.
Varga: This selection of facts is meant to suggest that on the national-democracy front, at least, things had been fine under Tito Stalinism. In fact it proves nothing. It is streamlined and simplified. It lacks both the political and historical dimensions and as we will see, misrepresents the dynamic of things for reasons of an a priori political “line”. But it seems to provide a barebones “economic-analysis" “Marxist” explanation — and that is what matters here. For Stop the War, the key point to get across is that the national question in Yugoslavia is not something real, autonomous.
Brownstone: The analysis is narrowly economistic and therefore misleading. Yes, the strike is the elemental form of working-class action. To relate to workers in such conflicts, even the tiniest, is the beginning of wisdom for socialists. Those socialists who develop a hoity-toity attitude — “we are political, not ‘economistic'; we are on a higher plane" — eviscerate themselves. Yet this elemental form of class struggle can be allied to many ideologies — from Peronism to Catholicism to every sort of nationalism. Politics is decisive. Stop the War fades out the dynamic national question in Yugoslavia. And with remarkable fortitude and restraint, you fade out strikes and other working-class actions in Kosova — some of the most significant labour action in former Yugoslavia!
Caliban: That proves we are not economists! We focus only on such strikes as serve our broader case! The Kosovar Albanian strikes were tainted by nationalism!
Brownstone: They were the highest form of industrial-political action in ex-Yugoslavia — and for a progressive and democratic cause, against colonial oppression.
Varga: This looks like an internationalist ideal realised — until bad men and IMF economics destroyed it! But if it both idealises Stalinist Yugoslavia and obliterates history, then that is good and desirable for Stop the War’s immediate objectives. For Stop the War, it is better to present Stalinist Yugoslavia as a society free of ethnic tensions and conflicts — in fact, to build on official Titoite ideology — in order to blame outsiders, namely the the IMF and NATO.
